Between teaching, working with staff, tutoring, and building a freelance career

Thursday, May 8, 2008

How To Think

Can your teach people how to think more creatively (or effectively)?

Ed Boyden, assistant professor at MIT thinks he can:

When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I've listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation.